The Scottish folk-rockers turned poetry into music in one of the most magical
shows you could hope to see. Rating: * * * * *

There is a perennial debate about whether rock lyrics can be regarded as poetry. In An Appointment with Mr Yeats, Mike Scott turns the discussion around by setting the poetry of WB Yeats to music, in the process creating one of the most magical and involving rock shows you could ever hope to see.

Looking the part of mad poet in velvet jacket and striped trousers, long hair flowing, Scott led an extraordinarily versatile ten-piece band through a musical odyssey that touched on all points of the Waterboys’ compass. This may have been a set of previously unheard material but, such is the sensitivity of both musical arrangement and theatrical setting, it flowed like a collection of Greatest Hits.

A dramatic declamation of The Second Coming at the apocalyptic conclusion of Mad as the Mist And Snow was the only recitation. These are very much songs, with Yeats’s words bent to serve supple grooves and flowing melodies. Scott has been aided in his task by the fact that Yeats was from an age when rhyming and metre were still central to a poet’s work, and Scott has edited carefully yet boldly.

He sometimes linked two poems together, as on the stirring Let the Earth Bear Witness, set to emotionally resonant footage from Iraq’s failed 2009 protests. As Scott repeatedly sang the phrase “They shall be alive forever” over images of people who may be dead or imprisoned, his voice shadowed by ghostly harmonies from young Irish folk singer Katie Kim, the effect is quite devastating.

Scott is no lyrical slouch himself, indeed his own verses have been admired by Bob Dylan, and his affinity for the words of the man he describes as “Ireland’s greatest writer” was apparent when he talked about Yeats’s subject matter: “Love, politics, the mystic, myth and the strange and curious mystery of being a human being on earth.”

Scott’s loving reinventions merely stir Yeats’s ageless themes up again for modern times. The greatest compliment I can pay to this show is that it immediately made me want to go home and read Yeats.

Yeats wrote around 600 poems before his death in 1939 aged 73, and Scott claims to have tried to set every one of them to music. That might have been too much for even his most dedicated fans. At the Barbican, he delivered around twenty, before rewarding the audience’s intense focus with a roaring run through a couple of Waterboys’ classics.

The language of The Whole of the Moon, an awed homage to genius, could have been plucked from Yeats himself. As Scott sang, “You came like a comet blazing your trail”, black and white footage of Yeats in a great, white hat looked down from a moon-shaped screen, smiling out on proceedings.